K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Regnum Online revisited

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

The last time I mentioned Regnum Online was well over a year ago, and to be honest it’s probably been that long since I played it for any extended period of time. There’s no reason for that other than my own commitments to other things, and it’s certainly not a reflection on the game.

Today is a holiday on my part of the planet, and with so much sudden free time, I figured it was only fitting that I completely ignore any other facet of my day-to-day life, and spend my time in complete and pointless recreation. And so I downloaded the latest version of Regnum and gave it a fresh turn.

The hardware is the same as the last time I played, so I did have a small fear that it might have somehow outgrown my system. That was not the case — although the game has improved by leaps and bounds, it hasn’t outstripped my Inspiron yet.

The installation process is probably the nicest improvement that I can find right now. The old Linux client needed a few tweaks to get started, and after the initial run you ended up downloading a rather large amount of software before you could play.

The current installer was GTK1-ish for me, and needed no special settings or outside packages (aside from the proprietary Nvidia driver) to start playing. And best of all, after the initial 300Mb package was in place, there was little more than a megabyte or two in updates that I needed to fetch, and that was handled automatically.

Once in place, gameplay is about the same, but the look and graphics seem to have … a little more depth. Here is a generic shot running on Ubuntu 8.04.1, with pure XFCE somewhere in the background.

A lot more quests seem to be finished than the last time I played, and I didn’t have to rely on my 20-year-old Spanish lessons to complete any of the tasks assigned to me. 😉 It’s nice that someone has taken the time to make sure all the important points are more or less in place.

Graphicswise, I’m playing at 1024×768 right now, with mediocre graphics settings and I’m quite satisfied. It’s not the same as my old XPS M170 I had three years ago, but I’m not burning up my Geforce 440 either.

In short, it’s nice to see that in the space of a year, Regnum has gone from good to very good, and hasn’t lost me to hardware obsolesence in the same time frame. If the game continues to develop at this pace, it will only continue to impress.

Enough blabbering. Time to go back to playing … before my holiday is over. 😦